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Monday, July 31, 2017

Rest day in Cairns. July 31st

Dropped bikes for tyre change and headed for the mall.
We all had different items to attend to and after coffee headed off to do our individual shopping.

Amongst the things I needed to attend to was getting a new sim working in my tablet. Had hoped to be able to just hotspot to my HTC handset, but this has proved frustratingly unreliable. Initial connection works fine, but inevitably the tablet will be unable to see the net. Handset still reports device is connected and tablet can see handset as a gateway. But all attempts to connect via web or any other networking app fails. Almost like DNS is no longer resolving. On the odd occasion the link will be fine for 30 minutes. But more often than not it will fail within a minute or less. Irrespective of the activity. The only remedy is to disable then re-enable the hotspot. Very frustrating!

So - simple solution is to get another data sim installed in the tablet and connect directly. Easy! So stopped at Telstra shop at Airlie Beach told the staff my needs. 5 minutes later I had a new sim and left with the standard caveat msg. "It may take 24 hours for it to be activated!" And so we rode off into the sunset, confident Telstra had fixed my problem. 24 hours later not only does my sim not work, I discover that precisely when my sim was "set up" in Airlie, on the other side of the continent the data dongle my mother was using on her laptop stopped working. No coincidence! After Celeste spent hours on the phone with the Telstra help desk it turns out that the staff in Telstra shop Airlie Beach had in their wisdom decided to "move" the existing data service from my mothers data dongle to my new sim and in the process stuffed them both. So here we are almost a week later and I have a new sim on an additional service working on my tablet. Alas my mother is still having problems, not least of all because she took her laptop in with her and because it runs Linux, Telstra staff threw their hands in the air and said nothing they can do because it's not MS Windows! This is despite the fact that before the current debacle it worked perfectly for 2 years!

la luta continua!

Meantime to kill time today waiting for the tyres to be fitted, we went to the movies and saw Dunkirk. Formal assessment to follow.

Afterwards we collected the bikes, although as per usual there was a small hitch. Ursala's BMW has tyre pressure sensors fitted, one of which got "damaged" in the process. So we wait the promised arrival of a replacement by express courier tomorrow...... Ah Queensland where mañana is a way of life.

Good news! A call from mater to let me know her internet connection has been restored! Everybody's happy!

Having had time to think about and discuss the movie I have been struck by an interesting historical echo. Brexit is like Dunkirk all over again.....